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Archive for the ‘keywords’ Category

Whether you own an e-commerce website or you’re promoting other people’s products as an affiliate, only one thing matters, and that’s making sales. In order to get sales you need to attract buying customers. This can present a challenge for smaller businesses and internet entrepreneurs trying to capatalize on the trillions of dollars spent every year online.

So how exactly do you attract buying customers? The answer is by targeting paying keywords.

Paying keywords are simply keywords that people type into a search engine when they’re looking to buy something. I don’t believe there’s any official name for these types of keywords, but I like to call them “paying” keywords because we can get paid when the people searching for these keywords land on our website.

These people are wanting to spend money on whatever it is they’re looking for, and there are certain keywords that are associated with this type of behavior. Essentially, all keywords are paying keywords; however, some keywords have a much higher probability that the person will actually buy.

Luckily for us, determining which keywords have a higher chance of being paying keywords isn’t a guessing game. Microsoft has been generous enough to provide a nifty tool for us that we can use to find these types of keywords. They call it Detecting Online Commerical Intention. Heres a video to help better explain this online activity and how you can exploit it in your marketing efforts…

To save you some time, simply Click Here to be taken straight to the keyword tool that I show in the video.

By now you should have a better understanding of what keywords you should be targeting and how to find them. Remember to use these keywords throughout your marketing efforts to attract buying customers and generate more sales.

For more internet marketing tips, advice and work from home resources, visit Alan Mater’s Work From Home Blog.

The latest SEO tool is not an automated submission device or some web page analyzing script. It’s the thesaurus on your desktop. No thesaurus? Better get one soon. Google has just announced that it has made great advancements in reading synonyms.

While even a small child can identify synonyms like pictures/photos, getting a computer program to understand synonyms is enormously difficult, and we’re very proud of the system we’ve developed at Google.

What does this mean for you?

If you are optimizing for “real estate Kentucky”, you had better not leave off related search words like “homes”, “property”, etc. These words will be treated as synonyms of “real estate”, and “real estate” will be treated as synonyms of them. More variations – in other words, more synonyms – looks a lot more like natural language than the forced language of always using the same word just for SEO purposes.

It also means that one website can easier dominate a niche across several searches. For instance, a page with a great link profile that was ranking very high for “real estate Kentucky” due to an astounding backlink profile, but was ranking at 100 for “Kentucky property”, might suddenly become competitive for “Kentucky property”. This is just an uneducated hunch, but I suspect that the strength of your backlink profile could help you greatly with searches for synonyms of the terms you are actually optimizing for.

In any case, this is good news for searchers, since their true intent is more likely to be satisfied. As web marketers, we also want to satisfy them, so make sure you use natural language with a generous use of that thesaurus – both on-page and in the text of your backlinks.

Do you know the age of your audience? Of course, if your website sells iPhone accessories, you have a pretty good idea. Or if you sell lawn bowling supplies, you also have a pretty good idea.

But most website owners, when asked the age of their audience, respond with “all ages”. This might be true, and it might not be all that true. Either way, it is worthwhile fining out, because how you market to people at various stages of their lives differs greatly. I was reminded of this by an article in Scientific American on how we change our attitudes as we age.

“Openness typically increases during a person’s 20s and goes into a gradual decline after that. This pattern of personality development seems to hold true across cultures. Although some see that as evidence that genes determine our personality, many researchers theorize that personality traits change during young adulthood because this is a time of life when people assume new roles: finding a partner, starting a family and beginning a career. Personality can continue to change somewhat in middle and old age, but openness to new experiences tends to decline gradually until about age 60.”

So knowing the stage of life your audience is in can make a big difference to whether you want to pitch your product as a “new experience” or an improvement on a familiar experience for example.

You might also find that attitudes impact what search terms to target. For instance, if you are pitching travel packages to a younger audience, the word “adventure” might be a key component of the search terms you focus on. If you are pitching to an older audience, you might prefer to use words like “nature” in your keyword development. Chances are your page will include both words, but where you place the emphasis is important.

It might be that the main difference in keyword focus is in your inbound links. Some links might use “Nature vacations in Peru”, whereas others might read “Adventure vacations in Peru”. If your link is on some lost “links” page buried deep in somebody’s website, it might not matter which anchor text you use. But if the link is prominent on somebody’s website, with the potential to bring real visitors with real money in their pockets, it pays to ask the linking website owner what his demographics are.

All marketing starts with knowing your audience. There is no marketing that is tougher than pitching to “everyone”.

The folks at Trellian have updated my favorite SEO tool, Keyword Discovery. (Yes, fair disclosure, that’s an affiliate link and I certainly appreciate anyone who uses it.) Keyword Discovery is my keyword tool of choice, so much more that a cheepie like me pays a monthly fee. In addition to the detailed keyword research I can do for new clients and to update ongoing clients, I use it to very quickly get a sense of what I might be up against competition-wise when quoting for a potential client.

Here are a few of the latest upgrades to Keyword Discovery, more or less in Trellian’s own words.

KeywordDiscovery Updates:

1. More Keyword Data Options—————————-

– With every keyword database you now have the ability to search through
even more data. Along with a recent update a new “Historical” option has
been added to every keyword database view search volume data from August
2006 onwards.

– US Regional specific dataset is now available.
The US keyword database has over 868 Million searches in the 12 month
database and over 1.6 billion in the 2 year historical database.

(Editor’s note. This will come in handy if you have a website that ships ony to the USA!)

– Keyword Density Tool Upgrade
A range of extra filtering, sorting, stop word list and view options have
been added. If you liked the keyword Density tool before, you will be
impressed with the all the new options.http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/tour-density.html

All these are incremental changes, of course. The best part is that you can get recent keyword research to find out what is new in how people are searching, and you can get the high-volume historical research to know what keywords have stood the test of time (and better choose long tail keywords). Plus, there are a number of country-specific databases.

Over at the High Rankings Forum, where I like to hang out when I have the time, this debate has burst forth (again!). It began exactly two weeks ago, and Jill Whalen, the forum’s owner, rekindled the spark by choosing it as the thread of the month in her newsletter.

On the one side, there are people who quite ardently and categorically believe that the domain name has no effect on rankings. Zero. Zilch. No way.

On the other side, there are people who swear that a domain name can make all the difference. All the way.

And there are of course, those (like me) who think the whole things is fairly non categorical and that domain names play an uncertain role.

I was reading the official Google blog about how they are making searching more user friendly in Catalonia and Estonia…but really, these were just examples, and what they are doing is just us applicable to New York or Melbourne. Using an Estonian example, they show how someone looking for a barber would be also considered to be looking for a barbershop. In other words, Google is working more and more on understanding the meaning of what we search for, not just the words.

For those of us who are searching, this reduces the guesswork of which words the website owners have chosen to use. For those of us who want Google to recognize the meaning of our wbe pages, it means we have to be more holistic in our explanations. The text welcoming visitors to the barber’s website should also include words like barbershop, shave, cut, hair, stylist, etc. It means to worry a little less about keywords and a little more about all-the-possible-keywords your visitors might be using when they think about your products, servicess or topics.

Those of us in the business have known this was coming, and some of us have suspected for a while that Google has been slowly getting better at understanding meaning, alternate spellings and alternative searches (Try searching for metal bending to see what I mean.) But this talk from Google sends a pretty clear message that they are serious about it and moving forward at a good clip. And can Yahoo and the rest be far behind?

That was part of a query I received from a lady needing translation of a French medical document into English. She was refering to the following paragraph from my “free lance englishfrench translaters” page.

P.P.S.: If you came searching for a free lance frenchenglish translater or free-lance englishfrench translaters, you won’t be the first to make a little spelling booboo. That’s OK; it’s our job to make sure that your final translated text is error-free.

This is just a cute way to get a few misspellings tactfully into the text of the page. When someone searches for “free lance translater”, their real intention is to find a “freelance translator”, so including the text on the page is one good way to help them find hwat they meant to type, not what they actually typed.

Is this appropriate? Are we tricking the search engines? Not at all. We are helping people find what they want. It is always wise to include as many variations of a word as possible. It is for that reason that writing naturally makes sense. Writing just for a keyword, say “Freelance French English Translator” would not sound right. Variations of these words should also appear on the page, such as “translation” and “translators” and maybe “translating”.

Including misspellings is another way of covering the various combinations of searches people might eb undertaking

Is bigger really better? Well, there is one advantage to having a bigger website – more long-tail search terms, which translates into more traffic.

Most website owners chase after the “big money” search terms: top ranking for “china dolls” or “Barbie dolls”, for example. Yet the traffic form hundreds of less-searched “long-tail search terms can be just as impressive…terms like “china dolls red and green” or “doll china miniatire umbrella”.

As I mentioned earlier, I am recommending the use of Hittail to all my clients. Reviewing the data from one client, whose website is fairly well ranked for some competitive search terms, I can see that of the 14,059 searches that brought traffic to his website in the past 19 days, 95% are three or more words long.

How do you capture long tail search term traffic?

Create many pages, each about a slightly different topic. For instance chnia dolls with umbrellas, china dolls with hats, china dolls with baskets, etc.

Use lots of text. The more text on the page, the more words will be searchable. For example, if someone searches for “china dolla with fruit baskets” and you have the word “fruit” on the china dioll with baskets page, you stand a chance of getting traffic from theat search.

Make sure to have frequent uses of typical support words, such as colors and locations, “men”, “women” and “children”, and words like buy, find, hire, get, my, etc.

Cover as many bases as possible and you can benefit from the long-tail search traffic.

One of our readers suggested trying HitTail, which is certainly not the same thing, but is very, very useful for anyone trying to learn something about a website’s visitors. It is a long-tail keyword research tool.

While I am logging in to HitTail, I should explain that this requires placing a little snippet of code in the template of your website, to capture every visitor landing on every page of your site. Now that I am logged in, let me describe to you what I see…

The first view “search hits” shows the last 15 visitors from the search engines and the exact date and time..real time coverage of the crowds moving through this website (except the blog; I just realized that I did not place the HitTail code in the blog template, so I will add that to my to-do list). For each visit, the search URL is provided, clickable so that I can visit the actual search (to see where my website ranks for that search, for example). Hmm…a search for SEO tips at Google and it appears we are #4. Not bad! Note that the keywords searched are actually highlighted so that it is ever so much easier to see than in regular log files.

I switch now to the “keywords” view, and the same information is provided in even easier to read format, listing each keyword and the engine it comes from. This time if you click on the keyword, you can move it into the “suggestion” view, for later consideration.

My favorite mode is to use the Excel option, so that I can manipulate the data, group some of the long tail search terms, and mark them in various ways. From a practical perspective, it seems that a lot of people are getting to my site using queries with the words “hire” and “looking”. So if those search terms are getting me traffic, and I am only in the top 20 somewhere for those search terms, maybe I could tweak my pages, build a few keyword-targeted links, and increase my traffic measurably.

I should note that the account is free, but HitTail also offers paid subscription services for enterprise websites and those who want to crunch some serious numbers. But for the average website owner, the free subscription will do fine.

Free SEO Tool #9: Go Rank Analyzer at http://www.gorank.com/analyze.php reviews your web page for a given search term to give you a snapshot of how the search term shows up on the page.Actually, this probably should be higher up on the list.In other words, I should use it more often.

Free SEO Tool #8: Aftervote at http://younanimous.com/ is a really different tool, and I’m not sure too many people would think of it as an SEO tool.It is, in fact, a meta search engine that combines the results of Google, Yahoo and MSN, along with some other factors to provide its own original results.So you can see at a glance which sites are doing well for a given search term across all three engines.It also features a number of performance indicators, including Google PageRank, Alexa ranking, Compete page strength, and a link to see the WhoIs data.You can also add a whole slew of plugins, including Netcraft reports and submission links for Digg and other social bookmarking websites.In short, this is a great all-in-one tool for sizing up the competition for an individual search term or for finding joint venture or link partners of value.One of the handy features is that you can see the Alexa ratings for some of your top competitors at once, so you can better judge the value of your own Alexa rating.Hmm.Actually, Aftervote is a bit like #10 above.

Free SEO Tool #7: Overture Keyword Selection Tool at http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ is useable.OK, this is one area where Mr. Cheapie here is willing to pay the big bucks, specifically for Keyword Discovery. But if you really want a free tool, Overture can really help.It just doesn’t carry over search data from previous months, so if data is seasonal, you have to wait until, say, the Christmas season to do the keyword research that will carry you next Christmas.

Free SEO Tool #6:Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/T4/index_pack.html is pretty useful.Sure people make way too much of it, but the little green bar gives an instantaneous snapshot of the value of a page.No green, and you might as well check the drop-down to make sure a page is cached.If it’s not, forget it.The difference between a PR2 and PR4 might be irrelevant in practical terms, despite the world wars and family feuds that can be fought over such minutia, but if the Toolbar shows a PR5, that’s pretty impressive (if it is real).If all you need is a quick snapshot, use the toolbar.If you want better info, use the Page Strength Tool or another.

Free SEO Tool #5: Spider simulator at http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php .This lets you see at a glance what the search engines see, which links they can follow and what text they see.I have often found major problems much quicker this way than wading through a jungle of code.It can also be helpful for locating hidden text and hidden links on competitors’ websites if you think they are all a bunch of thieving hooligans.There are probably hundreds of spider simulators of similar quality.I use this one; it works for me.

Free SEO Tool #4: Social Bookmarking Aggregator Tool athttp://www.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker.php should really be at #1, given that I created it and it is, of course, perfect.But it is more of a viral tool than an SEO tool.Still, the more people bookmark your pages, the more links they build and the more bloggers are likely to pick up on the bookmark and build links – all natural links the way Google and Yahoo like them!And it’s available in Spanish, too, at http://es.seo-writer.com/tools/bookmarker.php Go to the bottom of this post right now and click on the social bookmarking links to bookmark this post.You’ll see how it works and make me happy all at once.

Free SEO Tool #3:Common Links at http://www.randycullom.com/common_link.php is an even more ingenious backlink tool than Yahoo Site Explorer, but it is less flexible.Pick a search term, and plug it in.It will tell you which are the top ten sites for that term at Google or at Yahoo, then get the common backlinks.For instance, if a page links to three of the top ten websites for a certain search term, chances are that the same page is more likely to link to your similar website than a page that links to only one of your competitors (and could be the owners’ mother’s website, a satisfied client, a supplier, a buddy, another site owned by the same person, etc.)

Free SEO Tool #2:Yahoo Site Explorer, at https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ shows pages indexed and backlinks to either the site as a whole or to a specific page.This is superb competitive intelligence.You can mine your competitors’ backlinks to create your own backlinks.Unlike Google, Yahoo gives you the whole list.Why stop at your competitors?Why not look for complementary websites and what their backlinks are, too?

Free SEO Tool #1 –SEOmoz PageStrength Tool at http://www.seomoz.org/page-strength/ is a superb alternative the Google Toolbar’s PageRank measure.I like the PageStrength Tool because it pulls information from a number of indicators – including the Google PageRank toolbar – and provides a composite view of how important a page is.This is useful in evaluating potential partners, purchasing domains, sizing up the competition, etc.However, it does have some limitations.I have noticed that it sometimes draws inaccurate backlink data from Yahoo, and it gives big marks to certain very specific criteria, such as links from Wikipedia and Digg, rather than from a range ofmajor Web 2.0 sites.Still, it does include age of domain and Alexa ranking, both of which are also important, as well as a number of other indicators totally lost on the Google Toolbar addicts (and we all know how reliable the Google toolbar is every third Tuesday of even numbered months!).In some ways, this is similar to Aftervote and to the Top Ten Analysis SEO Tool, but it is a little more sophisticated.

So there you have it, my top ten list of free SEO tools.And no sooner will I hit the “publish” button, that I’ll tell myself that I really did not put them in the right order.